Douglas Gordon’s Predictable Incidents in Unfamiliar Surroundings is a film and installation that extracts scenes from the famous sci-fi TV series Star Trek, in each of which Captain Kirk is shown embracing a different woman in a different place.

Created in an edition of 5 other copies are held in the following institutions: FRAC Lorrain and Thyssen Bornemisza contemporary art collection.

Katrina M Brown in the Tate's publication on Douglas Gordon writes of the qualities shared by this work and Gordon's most celebrated early film, 24 Hour Psycho:

“Just as 24 Hour Psycho draws on a kind of off-beat yet mainstream culture, another video work of the same period derived its content from what has become a cult television series. Predictable Incidents in Unfamiliar Surroundings (1992/95) takes a number of excerpts from 'Star Trek', each of which features Captain Kirk in an embrace with a different woman, exposing an unexpectedly passionate strain in the famous sci-fi serial. Gordon's slowed-down footage presents various physical tangles, from the tender to the brutal, which suggest, as does the title, the irrepressible persistence of physical desire as an animating force, no matter what the environs.... The continuing series of Letters and Instructions, along with the video works Predictable Incidents in Unfamiliar Surroundings and 24 Hour Psycho, are indicative of the ways in which Gordon has consistently explored the extra-ordinary through existing common material. They typify Gordon's emergent and now characteristic melding of conceptual and analytic strategies with an astute control of their physical reception, an interest in the psychological, and the co-option of material found in mass culture." Katrina M. Brown, Douglas Gordon, Tate Publishing, 2004 (illustrated full page p. 23, discussed p.22 and p.31)

FRAC Lorraine, which owns one of the edition of this work, records the following:

“In his works and performances, Douglas Gordon manipulates different communication media such as the telephone, the letter, and video, etc., which help him to penetrate the private space of the interlocutor so as to act within his 'psychological space'. In 1993, with 24 hours Psycho, he introduced works in which he appropriated anthology pieces from film (Hitchcock's Psycho, John Ford's The Searchers), TV series (Star Trek) and documentaries which he projected on a video screen. He chose genre stereotypes, at once familiar and popular, and gave them a new twist by manipulating the reading of the image (breaks and caesuras, enlargement, appositions and appendages, 100p processing, slow motion...)… By relying on the familiarity of the cult sequences which he extracts from their context, he shifts the viewer's attention from the action to the structure of the images, and their capacity to construct cultural and moral behavioural patterns.”

Describing the work as a macho Party-pack, A.L. Steiner writes that “Predictable Incident in Unfamiliar Surroundings, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 comes replete with cases of beer for your drinking buddies; these may facilitate the circle jerk that will ostensibly occur while watching Captain Kirk of Starship Enterprise score endless streams of alien pussy (perhaps after watching a Zidane game). Kirk goes where no man had gone before - straight into the mouths of alien babes and out the other end of gender performativity. Doug directs us to watch Kirk (predictably) mouth a 40-minute decelerated succession of five select female Star Trek guests, from/on/near various (unfamiliar) planets and spacecraft. Kirk is The Captain - he does as he likes, how he likes, makes the best decisions and takes all the risks; we're the voyeurs of his interplanetary penetrations and varied acts of bravery and smarts.”

The work was included in a show at the Rodin Museum in Paris on the sculptor’s legacy and appropriated drew links with Rodin’s The Kiss. Ivo Bonacorsi writes of this show:

Douglas Gordon's video work from 1995, Star Trek: Predictable Incident in Unfamiliar Surroundings, is the only work presented individually in a small room on the first floor of the Hotel Byron. The reference to the renowned The Kiss (one of three versions in marble is on the ground floor) is more than evident, in particular in the curators' intentions, who see this video installation by the Scottish artist as a play of references with the idea, shared with Rodin, of working with series, fragments and repetition. Douglas Gordon proceeds with a sampling of rare Star Trek kiss scenes in which Captain Kirk is variously involved in lucky iconic clichés-which were then re-filmed, slowed down, and set in a playback loop-which generate surprising plasticity; just as the figures in Rodin's marbles are repeatedly approached and then abandoned.”